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Introduction
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in World War Z, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humanity vs. Monstrosity
Fear
The Fragility of Privilege and Modern Life
The Cost of War
Summary
Analysis
Greater Chongqing, The United Federation of China. The Greater Chongqing area had a pre-war population of over 35 million, but there are now barely 50,000 survivors. Reconstruction efforts by the government have been slow in this part of the nation, but the local security council, chaired by Kwang Jing-shu, has managed to prevent any further outbreaks.
The war has caused a staggering number of deaths and has left a broken world. It has also left a changed world, with China now called the “United Federation.”
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Kwang, an elderly doctor, describes the first outbreak that he saw. It was in a remote village that didn’t even have an official name. It was nicknamed “New Dachang” since the inhabitants had been forced to relocate from their village called “Old Dachang,” which had been flooded after the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Kwang had a hard time finding the place, and when he finally reached the village, he knew that something was seriously wrong. He found seven sick villagers in cots in the cold, damp community hall, which had been locked from the outside because, the villagers said, “it wasn’t ‘safe.’” Kwang felt upset at the peasants’ ignorance at a time when China was “the world’s richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space.”
The peasants whom Kwang meets were forced to abandon their old home and relocate to a village that the authorities haven’t even bothered to name. They are some of the victims of pre-war China’s push for progress and modernity, since their old village was flooded after the Three Gorges Dam was constructed. Later in the novel, the collapse of this dam, which was improperly planned and maintained, will cause much tragedy and the loss of many lives. Progress wasn’t even, and peasants like these bore the cost of China’s desire to become “the world’s richest and most dynamic superpower.”
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The first patient Kwang examined was a woman who had a high fever and was shivering, and he noticed a bite mark on her arm. The other six patients had similar symptoms, and all had bite marks, too. Kwang asked who had bitten them and the villagers took him to a 12-year-old boy they kept tied, gagged, and locked in an abandoned house. Kwang tells the narrator that this was “Patient Zero.” The villagers tried to hold Kwang back and warned him not to get close to the boy, but Kwang did not listen. He found the boy had cold, gray skin, no blood at the sites of his many wounds, and no pulse. The boy was “inexplicably hostile” and tried to bite Kwang as he examined him, so Kwang ordered two strong villagers to help him hold the boy down.
When Kwang tried to get a blood sample, Patient Zero struggled so violently that his arm broke off from his body, and yet he didn’t even seem to notice. Kwang’s two assistants were frightened and ran away, and Kwang, too, was so unnerved by the sick child that he hurried out and locked the door behind him.
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The villagers were reluctant to disclose how the boy got sick, and finally, a woman told Kwang that the boy and his father had gone diving in the reservoir to try and find something valuable from the villages that had been submerged by the waters of the dam. This was an illegal activity, and Kwang promised he wouldn’t inform the police. The boy’s father never reappeared, while the boy had resurfaced, crying, with a bite mark on his foot.
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Kwang called his old friend, Dr. Gu Wen Kuei, who worked at the Institute of Infectious Diseases. As soon as Kwang showed him the infected patients, Gu turned serious and asked Kwang to vacate the room and secure the doors, promising to send “support.” In less than an hour, 50 men in hazmat suits arrived in helicopters, claiming to be from the Ministry of Health. Kwang suspected they were instead from the Ministry of State Security. As the patients were carried out and taken away, an old woman screamed at them, saying this was their punishment for destroying Fengdu, an ancient city of temples and shrines, which had also been drowned by the waters of the dam.
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Gu had subtly warned Kwang before the army men had arrived that this was something very serious, giving him enough time to call his daughter and warn her to leave the country. The section ends with the narrator noting that Kwang Jingshu was arrested by the MSS and imprisoned without any formal charges. By the time he escaped, the outbreak had spread outside of China.
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Lhasa, The People’s Republic of Tibet. Lhasa is the “world’s most populous city” and is celebrating the results of its most recent elections, in which the Social Democrats overthrew the Llamist Party. The narrator meets Nury Televaldi here, and says that they have to shout to be heard over the revelers.
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Televaldi says that before the outbreak, overland smuggling was neither popular nor profitable, so he’d been an importer of illegal goods and people. But after the illness broke out, people were desperate to get out and he arranged for them to do so. While the government pretended to come down hard on smugglers like him—or shetou, as they were called—Televaldi claims that he could bribe his way through quite easily. He says that he did most of his smuggling over land to places like Kashi, and only dabbled in air travel to Kazakhstan or Russia. On the east coast of China, however, clients paid more and managed to get to cities like London and San Francisco. While shetous tried to make sure their clients were not infected, some just didn’t have visible bites and escaped detection.
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Many of these refugees had hoped there might be a cure for the infection in the West, but were also afraid to see a doctor when they got there because they worried they might be sent back to China. Televaldi says these refugees were desperate, “trapped between their infections and being rounded up and ‘treated’ by their own government.” Many refugees disappeared into the big cities. Some lived with family or friends, but most “simply melted into the host country’s underbelly.” Televaldi surmises that this is why so many outbreaks started in “First World ghettos.”
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Televaldi smuggled most of his clients into central Asia, into countries so poor and where the officials were so corrupt that they welcomed his business. The narrator asks him if he saw many infected people, and Televaldi says that he didn’t in the beginning, because the infected were spotted on the road and taken away by the police. However, later, the number of infestations multiplied and the police were unable to keep up, and he began seeing many. They were rarely dangerous since their families would have them tied up, and some were even kept in crates with airholes.
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Televaldi considers himself lucky because he wasn’t involved in sea smuggling, which was much more dangerous since infected clients could infect everyone on board. Some captains tossed out the infected onto the first deserted coast they came across, while others threw them into the sea. While he didn’t have to encounter anything quite as terrifying, he did have an experience that convinced him it was time to quit smuggling. One of his clients was a wealthy investment banker from Xi’an who was escaping into Kyrgyzstan with a locked trailer full of infected family members. Looking at this wealthy man, scratched and desperate, Televaldi was convinced that soon, money wasn’t going to be worth very much.
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Meteora, Greece. The monasteries at Meteora were built into rocks as a refuge from the Ottoman Turks, and they also proved to be effective against the zombies. This has made Meteora popular with pilgrims and tourists. Stanley MacDonald, a Canadian veteran, has traveled here to seek peace. He first encountered the zombies while on an anti-drug operation in Kyrgyzstan. His team discovered a caravan that had been attacked and was surrounded by blood and rotting flesh, but they found no corpses other than those of the mules. The opium hadn’t been touched, which puzzled Macdonald and his men. They followed the trail of blood to a cave.
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Inside, they found human remains. The intact bodies had been killed by shots to the head, and they had chewed up meat in their throats and stomachs. The rest were just pieces of bodies. The innermost room of the cave had collapsed from a detonated booby trap, and there was a moving hand sticking out through the rubble. MacDonald instinctively grabbed it, and it immediately latched onto his, crushing his fingers and not letting go even when he dug his heels in and tried to pull away. A zombie’s torso emerged as MacDonald pulled, and tore away from the lower half of its body which was still stuck under the rocks. It was clawing at MacDonald, trying to chomp at his arm. MacDonald shot its head off.
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After sharing their discoveries back in Edmonton, MacDonald and his team were told they’d been exposed to “unknown chemical agents” or were having an adverse reaction to their prophylactic medication. They were also told they must be suffering from PTSD and needed to be evaluated. MacDonald concludes the interview by saying he was a good soldier and thought he “was ready for anything,” but nothing could have prepared him for the zombies.
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The Amazon Rain Forest, Brazil. The narrator goes to the settlement of the Yanomami or the “Fierce People” to speak with Fernando Oliveira, a drug-addled white man. Oliveira says that before the outbreak, he made a lot of money by performing illegal organ transplants. Many of his clients were North American. One Austrian patient, Herr Muller, needed a new heart and it arrived in a plastic picnic cooler from the airport, most likely from China. Oliveira assisted Dr. Silva, a cardiologist, to perform the heart transplant.
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Herr Muller never woke up from the anesthesia. His symptoms—“temperature, pulse rate, oxygen saturation”—started right after they sewed him closed. Dr. Silva put it down to a reaction to the medication or just the trauma of such a big procedure, and he told Oliveira to go relax and that he would watch Muller. While Oliveira was out on the town, his receptionist called him in a panic to tell him that Muller had slipped into a coma. Oliveira rushed back to the clinic to find the receptionist consoling one of the nurses, who was crying. The nurse said that Muller had flatlined unexpectedly, and while Dr. Silva was trying to revive him, he’d woken up and bitten him. The nurse had run out and locked the door behind her.
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Oliveira got his gun from his car, and then knocked on Muller’s door. Receiving no response, he entered to find blood covering the floor and Silva lying in a corner, with Muller feeding on him. Muller turned towards Oliveira and started walking towards him. Oliveira shot him, blowing his head off. He then called the police, whom he usually paid off to look the other way when he performed his illegal surgeries. They covered up the incident by claiming that a murderer had broken in and killed Silva and Muller.
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Oliveira says that Muller’s wife was lucky because he had reanimated immediately rather than carrying the virus back home. Muller immediately showed symptoms because he got an infected heart which had direct access to the circulatory system, but that symptoms would be slow to show up if other body parts were transplanted, like a liver or a skin graft. He says that many organs came from China, and that thousands of people got illegal organ transplants before the Great War broke out. He is sure that some of them were infected, which is one of the ways the virus made its way into developed nations.
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Oliveira says that none of his clients, even those from the “self-righteous United States,” cared where the organs came from, though they were often procured cruelly and unethically. The narrator asks him if he ever tried to warn clients after their surgeries that they might have been infected, and Oliveira says that by the time he realized how serious the situation was, it was too late.
Bridgetown Harbor, Barbados, West Indies Federation. Jacob Nyathi, a sea captain in the West Indies, says that he was born in South Africa. Nyathi grew up in extreme poverty in a township outside Cape Town. One day, while returning from work at 5 a.m., he heard gunfire coming from the shanties his home was in. People began to run, screaming, “They’re coming!” Nyathi’s family lived in the direction the crowd was running from, so he tried to make his way against the crowd but was knocked into a collapsing shanty. When he managed to get up, he saw the zombies, “slouching steadily towards [him] with their arms raised.”
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A zombie attacked Nyathi from behind, and he saw that it had a knife sticking out of its chest and that “black fluid” ran from the wound. Nyathi escaped by slamming a cooking pot against its skull until “the bone split open and the brains spilled out.” He ran out and saw a woman hiding with two children huddled against her. Nyathi tried to get them to go with him, but the woman was so afraid and confused that she stabbed him. Nyathi left them and ran, but still thinks about them.
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Nyathi ran into blinding headlights and felt something hid his shoulder right before he passed out. He woke up in Groote Schuur Hospital and discovered that he’d been shot by the police. He overheard people talking about an outbreak of “rabies,” and that there were 15 cases in the hospital and probably many more out in the city.
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Tel Aviv, Israel. The narrator meets Jurgen Warmbrunn, an Israeli intelligence agent, at an Ethiopian restaurant. Warmbrunn says that most people “don’t believe something can happen until it already has.” But he was “born into a group of people who live in constant fear of extinction,” and they are always wary.
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The first warning Warmbrunn had that something was amiss was from friends and customers in Taiwan who complained about the new software decryption program that was either failing to decode some emails from China or decoding them poorly. When he took a look at these emails, he saw that they were about “a new viral outbreak that first eliminated its victim, then reanimated his corpse into some kind of homicidal berzerker.” He didn’t believe these messages were literal—he suspected it was a code within a code—and yet felt uneasy about them.
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Sometime later, Warmbrunn spoke to a professor from Hebrew University who told him about his cousin in South Africa who’d spoken about golems and “reanimating human bodies.” Warmbrunn got in touch with the cousin, who told him about the stories he’d heard from the hospital staff at Groote Schuur. After the Arab attack of 1973, intelligence analysts in Israel were wary and investigated everything. Warmbrunn uncovered cases of “rabies” like at Cape Town, psychological evaluations of the Canadian troops who had returned from Kyrgyzstan, and blog records of a Brazilian nurse who spoke of the murder of a heart surgeon. He came to believe in the existence of this new threat, and also discovered that they could be destroyed by destroying their brains.
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Warmbrunn reached out to his friend Paul Knight, a former CIA agent who now worked in private security. Knight, too, had been working on the same project in his own time, and the two of them combined all the information they had in a report that came to be called the Warmbrunn-Knight report, even though it contained inputs from various experts from around the world. Warmbrunn says that if the report had been taken seriously, the outbreak would never have reached epic proportions. He says that the South African war plan deservedly gets a lot of credit, but that it would have been unnecessary if more people had read and followed this report. His own government, too, barely followed it, and there was a high price to be paid.
Bethlehem, Palestine. Saladin Kader is professor of urban planning at Khalil Gibran University in Bethlehem, which is “one of the Middle East’s most affluent cities.” He says that he was raised in Kuwait City, where he worked after school at a Starbuck’s. This was where he watched the Al Jazeera broadcast in which the Israeli ambassador announced to the UN General Assembly that their country would be entering “voluntary quarantine.” Kader had joined the other customers in their jeers and catcalls, disbelieving the story about the zombies, especially since it came from his “most hated enemy.”
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Kader’s father, who was a janitor at a hospital, had been on duty on a night when there had been an African rabies outbreak, and had decided it was too dangerous to stay in Kuwait. Since Israel had offered asylum to all Palestinians who had once lived within its borders, Kader’s father wanted to return, which made Kader furious. His father tried to convince him that he had no loyalty to the Israelis, but only wanted to go there since they seemed to be the only country preparing for the calamity at hand. Kader planned to stay behind and join a terrorist organization in Kuwait, and he called his father a disbeliever for choosing to return. His father, who was neither a large nor violent man, slapped Kader and shouted at him—and finally, Kader was cowed into obeying.
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When the asylum-seekers approached the border of Israel, Kader saw the Wall for the first time. It surrounded the entire border of Israel. They were made to walk slowly past large dogs in cages. The dogs barked furiously at an old man who walked just ahead of Kader, and he was immediately taken to a black unmarked van. Kader thought the Israelis were separating the infirm and old who might be of no use to them in internment camps. Then, a loud, well-dressed American behind him also set off the dogs and was escorted out, which puzzled Kader. He thought the dogs might be screening for rabies, which is what he believed the entire time he was in the resettlement and quarantine camp.
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Kader and his family felt like prisoners at the overcrowded camp with its barbed wire and guards. After three weeks, his family cleared their medical examinations and were put on a bus for Tel Aviv. However, as their bus entered the city, they were shot at by civilian Jews, and an Israeli soldier sacrificed his life to protect them. This was the beginning of the Israeli Civil War, which was fought because many Israelis were unhappy with their government’s decision to repatriate Palestinians and pull out of the West Bank.
Just then, one of the unmarked vans drove by and was hit by a handheld rocket. It burst into flames and figures started to crawl out of it, through the fire. The soldiers started shooting at them, but these figures kept moving until they were shot in the head. Kader says he suddenly understood “what the Israelis had been trying to warn the rest of the world about” and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t listen.
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